Wasfi Al-Nider sits motionless on a couch looking at a small screen. Whenever it goes blank, it is the sign of yet another power cut hitting Gaza. But while most blackouts deprive many fellow Gazans of working on computers or watching TV, the screen the 63-year-old is looking at is connected to his blood and a kidney dialysis machine.

“Whenever there is a blackout, I’m in Allah’s hands,” Wasfi says. “The machine just stops, blood stops circulating, I just cry.”

Gaza has witnessed a steep increase in blackouts since the European Commission handed over responsibility for buying industrial fuel needed to operate Gaza’s only power plant to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah late last year. The entire coastal strip is now plunged in total darkness for up to 12 hours a day, disrupting the daily lives of Palestinians who are already living with hardships caused by the Israeli blockade.

Corporations go to a lot of trouble to neutralize potential critics. Recent examples: two co-optations (McDonald’s alliance with Weight Watchers and PepsiCo’s with the Yale School of Medicine) and one aggression (Disney’s forced expulsion of the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood from Harvard).

The moral: if you want to do something to prevent childhood and adult obesity, you are working against the economic interests of corporations that profit from kids eating too much food or watching too much television. And you must take great care to hold on to your independence.

Every day the Knesset has the option of passing laws that will advance Israel as a democratic Jewish state or turn it into a racist Jewish state. There is a very thin line between the two. This week, the line was crossed. If the Knesset legal counselor did not consider the bill entitled “the Jewish National Fund Law” as sufficiently racist to keep it off the agenda, it is hard to imagine what legislation she will consider racist.

In 1995 the Supreme Court rescued the state from callously discriminating against its Arab citizens through the Ka’adan case, which prohibited the Israel Lands Administration from discriminating against non-Jews by leasing land through the Jewish Agency. Since then the attorney general has stated that such discrimination is unacceptable – also when it is carried out through the Jewish National Fund. The MKs were unable to accept this egalitarian ruling, and on Wednesday a large majority of 65 voted in favor of a preliminary reading permitting such discrimination. The bill is also backed by the head of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, MK Menahem Ben-Sasson

The clause in the bill stating that “the leasing of JNF lands for the purpose of settling Jews will not be seen as unacceptable discrimination,” even though it involves 13 percent of state-controlled lands and allows for further expressions of discrimination. For example, the establishment of a university only for Jews on JNF land, or a hospital, or a movie theater.

Writing in the March 11 Wall Street Journal, Steven J. Law, a bigwig lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, turns reality on its head by claiming working people and their unions were the BIG winners in the 5-4 Supreme Court “Citizens United” decision.

The big business group is calling for draconian, and probably unconstitutional, limits on workers’ ability to collectively have an impact on politics, to elect people that they feel will represent their interests. The Chamber of Commerce proposed anti-worker, anti-union restrictions include: require secret ballot elections to approve political spending; prohibit public sector unions from participating in elections of politicians who “will oversee their labor contracts” and prohibit the government from allowing automatic union dues payments from employee paychecks.

The LA Times reports that the Chamber of Commerce is getting “record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealth individuals.”

The article points to the Supreme Court decision as one reason for the influx of cash. The other is Wall Street and Big Business concern about Obama administration policies that curb corporate power and exert a role for government whether it be in health care, carbon emissions or financial regulations. The chamber is decidedly backing Republicans, the article says.

Here is a leaked copy of the Zionist plan to attack the Boycott and Divestment Campaign Against Israel’s Occupation and to strategy to shut down the debate on the Palestinian issue and to shift it discussion of anti-Semitism and not Israel’s illegal Occuption and illegal settlements and human rights violations.